... i didnt set a drive as a swap drive since i have 3GB of ram. think that'll be okay?

The kernel needs a little swap space.
Try 100MB(it actually uses less but that is a good number). The only other time swap is used depends on how much you have running at once or if some errant program has a memory leak. A memory leak w/o a large swap will quickly stall the system but in almost ten years, I only experienced that once. Even then, not a memory leak precisely.

You can use a "swapfile" and not set a drive(partition) for swap so there is no need to (re)partition space to accommodate a swap.

Other locations(other than /) are okay. Best location is on a separate physical drive, if you have a second physical drive.
You will want to set it to activate at every boot. I'll leave that for you to determine how to do it(you did say "its amazing how much i have learned"). It's not hard ... .